Tate pulled her to him, hugged her, smelled the scent of Opium perfume in her hair. He said, “Better not.”

18

Crazy Megan reveals her true self.

She isn’t crazy at all and never has been. What C.M. is is furious.

He’s going down, she mutters. This asshole Peter is going down hard.

Megan McCall was angry too but she was much less optimistic than her counterpart as she moved cautiously through the corridors of the hospital, clutching three boxes of plastic dining utensils under her arm and her glass knife in the other.

Though she was feeling better physically, having eaten half a box of her favorite cereal-Raisin Bran-and drunk two Pepsis.

Listening.

There!

She heard a shuffle, a few steps of Peter’s feet. Maybe a whisper of breath.

Another shuffle. A voice.

Was he muttering her name?

Yes, no?

She couldn’t tell.

This could be it! Got a good grip on the knife?

Be quiet! Megan thought. She shivered and felt a burst of nausea from the fear. Wished she hadn’t eaten so fast. If I puke he’ll hear and that’ll be it…

She inhaled slowly.

A clunk nearby. More footsteps. These were close.

Megan gasped and closed her eyes, remaining completely still, huddling behind an orange fiberglass chair.

She pressed into the wall and began mentally working her way through Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits album line by line. She cried noiselessly throughout “Me and Bobby McGee,” then grew defiant once more when she mind-sang “Down on Me.”

Peter Matthews wandered away, back toward his room, and she continued on. Ten endless minutes later she made it to the end of the corridor she’d decided to use.

It was here that she was going to lay the trap.

She needed a dead end-she had to be sure of which direction he’d come from. Crazy Megan points out, though, that it also means she’ll have no escape route if the trap doesn’t work.

Who’s the pussy now? Megan asked.

Like, excuse me, C.M. snaps in response. Just letting you know.

She rubbed her hand over the wall.

Sheetrock.

Megan had recalled one time she’d been at her father’s house. A few years ago. He’d been dating a woman with three children. As usual he’d been thinking about marrying her-he always did that, it was so weird-and’d gone so far as to actually hire a contractor to divide the downstairs bedroom into two smaller ones for her young twins. Halfway through the project they’d broken up; the construction went unfinished but Megan recalled watching the contractors easily slice through the Sheetrock with small saws. The material had seemed as insubstantial as cardboard.

She took a plastic dinner knife from the box. It was like a toy tool. And for a moment the hopelessness of her plan overwhelmed her. But then she started to cut. Yes! In five minutes she’d sliced a good-sized slit into the wall. The blades were sharper than she’d expected.

For about fifteen minutes the cutting went well. Then, almost all at once, the serrated edge of the knife wore smooth and dull. She tossed it aside and took a new one. Started cutting again.

She lowered her head to the plasterboard and inhaled its stony moist smell. It brought back a memory of Joshua. She’d helped him move into his cheap apartment near George Mason University. The workmen were fixing holes in the walls with plasterboard and this smell reminded her of his studio. Tears flooded into her eyes.

What’re you doing? an impatient Crazy Megan asks.

I miss him, Megan answered silently.

Shut up and saw. Time for that later

Cutting, cutting… Blisters formed on the palm of her right hand. She ignored them and kept up the hypnotic motion. Resting her forehead against the Sheetrock, smelling mold and wet plaster. Hand moving back and forth by itself. Thoughts tumbling…

Thinking about her parents.

Thinking about bears…

No, bears can’t talk. But that didn’t mean you couldn’t learn something from them.

She thought of the Whispering Bears story, the illustration in the book of the two big animals watching the town burn to the ground. Megan thought about the point of the story. She liked her version better than Dr. Matthews’s; the moral to her was: people fuck up.

But it didn’t have to be that way. Somebody in the village could have said right up front, “Bears can’t talk. Forget about ‘em.” Then the story would have ended: “And they lived happily ever after.”

Working with her left hand now, which was growing a crop of its own blisters. Her knees were on fire and her forehead too, which she’d pressed into the wall for leverage. Her back also was in agony. But Megan McCall felt curiously buoyant. From the food and caffeine inside her, from the simple satisfaction of cutting through the wall, from the fact that she was doing something to get out of this shithole.

Megan was thinking too about what she’d do when she got out.

Dr. Matthews had tricked her-to get her to write those letters. But the awesome thing was that what she’d written had been true. Oh, she was pissed at her parents. And those bad feelings had been bottled up in her forever, it seemed. But now they were out. They weren’t gone, no, but they were buzzing around her head, getting smaller, like a blown-up balloon you let go of. And she had a thought: The anger goes away; the love doesn’t. Not if it’s real. And she thought maybe, just maybe-with Tate and Bett-the love might be real. Or at least she might unearth a patch of real love. And once she understood that she could recall other memories.

Thinking of the time she and her father went to Pentagon City on a spur-of-the-moment shopping spree and he’d let her drive the Lexus back home, saying only, “The speedometer stops at one forty and you pay any tickets yourself.” They’d opened the sunroof and laughed all the way home.

Or the time she and her mother went to some boring New Age lecture. After fifteen minutes Bett had whispered, “Let’s blow this joint.” They’d snuck out the back door of the school, found a snow saucer in the playground and huddled together on it, whooping and screaming all the way to the bottom of the hill. Then they’d raced each other to Starbucks for hot chocolate arid brownies.

And she even thought of her sweet sixteen party the only time in- how long?-five, six years she’d seen her parents together For a moment they’d stood close to each other, near the buffet table, while her father gave this awesome speech about her. She’d cried like crazy hearing his words. For a few minutes they seemed like a perfectly normal family.

If I get home, she now thought.. No, when I get home, I’ll talk to them. I’ll sit down with them. Oh, I’ll give ‘em flicking hell but then I’ll talk. I’ll do what I should’ve done a long lime ago.

The anger goes away; the love doesn’t…

A blister burst. Oh, that hurt. Oh, Jesus. She closed her eyes and slipped her hand under her arm and pressed hard. The sting subsided and she continued to cut.

After a half hour Megan had cut a six-by-three-foot hole in the Sheetrock. She worked the piece out and rested it against the floor then leaned against the wall for a few minutes, catching her breath. She was sweating furiously.

The hole was ragged and there was plaster dust all over the floor She was worried that Peter would see it and guess she’d set a trap for him. But the window at this end of the corridor was small and covered with grease and dirt; very little light made it through. She doubted that the boy would ever see the trap until it was too late.

She snuck back to where his father-or someone-had bricked up the entrance to the administration area of the hospital and, quietly, started carting cinder blocks back to the trap, struggling under their weight. When she’d lugged eight bricks back to the corridor she began stacking them in the hole she’d cut, balancing them on top of one another, slightly off center.